Thursday, May 21, 2015

The River Home

This is a book review/personal memoir as I recall some of my
own experiences on the Waccamaw as I review the author’s book about a trip down
this river.

Franklin Burroughs, The
River Home: A Return to the Carolina Low Country (1992, Athens: University
of Georgia Press, 1998), 208 pages.

I lived
in Whiteville, North Carolina for three years in the early 1980s. During this period, I spent a lot of time
around Lake Waccamaw and took two incredible overnight trips on the Waccamaw
River, between the lake and Old Dock. I
remember thinking the Waccamaw was possibly the finest black water river in
Eastern North Carolina (it would be a close call between the Waccamaw and the
Black River). A few months ago, when I
was reading John Lane’s book, Waist Deepin Black Water, I learned of this book about a trip down the Waccamaw and
immediately set out to find a copy. I
was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the writing. This is a wonderful book and now that I have
read it, I will have to find another book, The
Voyage of the Paper Canoe by Nathaniel Holmes Bishop. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Bishop
paddled his canoe along the eastern seaboard.
When he reached Wilmington, NC, he took a train to Lake Waccamaw and
then paddled down the river to Georgetown, SC, before continuing on along the
coastline. Bishop’s journey inspired
Burroughs.

Franklin
Burroughs teaches at Bowdoin College in Maine, but he grew up along the banks
of the Waccamaw River in Conway, South Carolina. In a used bookstore on Cape Cod, he came
across a copy of On the River which
introduced him to Nathaniel Holmes Bishop.
Recalling his childhood, in which he’d fished much of the South Carolina
sections of the river in Horry County, he decided he should paddle the whole
river. His father took him to Lake
Waccamaw for the start of his journey, but his introduction to the upper part
of the Waccamaw came on the drive north when they passed the river in Pireway and
there was a baptism being performed.
Burroughs traveled the river from the lake to Conway by himself, then
had a friend of his join him as they paddled down to Georgetown.

At the beginning of the book, Burroughs provided a historic description
of Horry County (known among themselves as the “Independent Republic”) that I
found to be less than flattering. As he
noted, there was so little of interest in the county that wars past it by
(there were no battles there in the Revolutionary War or Civil War). The big rice plantations laid south of Horry
near Georgetown and Charleston (or north, although he doesn’t mention it, along
the Cape Fear River in North Carolina.
As a native Tar Heel, I needed to put in a plug). Horry was a place of turpentine stills (along
with another kinds of stills) and lumbering operations. It wasn’t until the last century that people
discovered the beaches of Horry (Myrtle Beach, etc) that has put the county on
the map. Just ten miles or so inland
from the beaches flows the Waccamaw, a river that is still fairly wild.

Burroughs made his trip in 1985 (two years after my last
trip down the Waccamaw).

Dodo showing one of his dugout canoes
on Crusoe Island, 1982

The upper part
of the river is small and sometimes one has to pull the canoe over logs that
have blocked the river. As he approaches
Crusoe Island, a piece of high ground in the middle of the Green Swamp a few
hours paddle from the lake, he encounters Thomas Spivey, a resident of Crusoe
who lets him paddle one of his dugout cypress log canoes and make him a dough
bowl which he hollows out of a log plank.
Spivey also shows him the snakes that the catches and sells to museums
and laboratories. When I ran the river,
I was always shocked at how few snakes one saw on it around Crusoe Island, due
to the efforts of the Spivey’s at catching them. I think it was the Spiveys who had a pit with
snakes in the bottom, crawling over one another and even though I am not overly
frightened by snakes, the thought of falling into that pit would be akin to
falling into hell. The man I best
remember at Crusoe was Dodo (I think his last name was Clewis) who I believed
lived just north of the Spiveys (if my memory is right, the Spiveys lived just south
of the landing, Dodo lived just north of it).
I still have a bread bowl that Dodo dug out of a plank of aged swamp
wood (probably harvested from Georgia Pacific land). In the early 80s, most folks on the island
made their living from the swamp and it was a place game wardens were always
weary even though they did arrest a number of swamp residents for selling
illegal game. It was an interesting and a little scary place
as there was only one road into the island from Old Dock. If I remember correctly, that road was built
in the 40s and not even paved until the 60s.

Paddling down from Crusoe Island, he recalls stories from
Bishop’s journey such as staying in a home of the foreman on the turpentine
still (the foreman was a Gore and even today, there surname Gore is common in
lower Columbus County). Below Old Dock,
the river becomes wider. He tells of
stories of men building log rafts of timber and floating them down to Conway to
the mill. At Pireway (where I
had the last connection with the river), riverboats would occasionally make it
up this far during high water. In my blog,
I have written about Delano, the scoutmaster of a Mormon troop in Pireway
(although the troop was registered and located in “Tabor City, to the west of
Pireway, all the members of the church I knew when I worked that territory for
the Boy Scouts lived in the Pireway area).
Delano was quite a character and you’ll have to go back to my post on
him to see what I mean.

Phil Morgan, 1982,
in the bow of my old canoe on the Waccamaw

South of Pireway, Burroughs is in territory that he was familiar
with as a youth. He begins to tell
stories of his family and how they ended up in Conway as well as his own
fishing adventures with his father and with friends along the river. I particularly liked his story of the
two-sided paddle wheelers that made it up the river (they were still coming up
when his father was a boy). Having
paddles on both sides of the boat, the captain could reverse one paddle while
moving forward with the other, allowing him to navigate the narrow twists and
bends of the river. Burroughs also tells
about the lumber operations in Conaway and his memories of his grandmother’s
home. As he continues south, with a
friend, he begins to weave in the history of the rice plantations built upon slavery that dotted
the river as it approached Georgetown. There,
too, the river joins the much larger and silt-filled Pee Dee River before
flowing out into the ocean. It was in
this section that they got caught trespassing on private land but befriended the
caretaker and end up being invited for breakfast.

I found this to be a delightful book and makes me want to go
back and once again paddle the Waccamaw as it has been over 30 years since I
have been on its dark waters. One of the back cover reviewers of the book compared it to Goodbye to a Riverby John Graves. I have also reviewed Graves book and both authors do a fine job of weaving together their adventures with the history of the area. Even if
you never set your eyes on the Waccamaw, this book is a treat to read.

A river flows through us all! You sure have had great fortune in your travels and places that you have lived. It always makes for such a good life! I feel a great loss for those folks that I know who have never left the immediate area where they live.

The cypress give off tannin that causes the water to be dark--if you put it in a glass it will cook like weak tea, but when you look on such rivers, it appears black and there is not much visibility. There are other trees that do this such as hemlock in the northern forests.

Musings

This blog contains observations on life and nature written by Sage, satire and parody written by Nevada Jack, and an occasional book review or poem. As a general rule, the author of the blog doesn't write about his work or his family. Email at sagecoveredhills [at] gmail.com